by Candace Camp
He smiled and trailed a wistful finger down her cheek.
The door jerked open, and Philippe straightened. Albrecht Schlieker stood framed in the doorway. His face was cold, but the pale blue eyes were bright and alive, gleaming with hatred. “So,” he began, his voice clipped, “Monsieur Michaude.” He gave him a parody of a smile. “Fooled us very cleverly, didn’t you?”
Philippe said nothing, merely continued to gaze expressionlessly at him.
“It is not often I make such a mistake in my judgment of men,” Schlieker continued. The frozen fire in his eyes promised that Philippe would pay for that mistake. “I am here to take you back to Paris. It will be more convenient to question you there. I imagine the interrogation will take a good deal of time.” He smiled again, a real smile this time, and it chilled Alyssa’s blood. “You are one prisoner I shall take great pleasure in breaking, Philippe. I only hope you don’t give in easily.”
Again Philippe made no response, and it seemed to irritate the other man. He jerked his head in an impatient gesture for them to leave. “Let’s go.”
Schlieker strode out of the small jail building, Alyssa and Philippe following him, two guards with guns behind them. Schlieker’s armed driver snapped to attention and opened the front door for him. The guards shoved Alyssa and Philippe into the rear seat and one of the guards sat beside them. A moment later, the long black car zoomed off.
*****
Stephen Marek crouched in a ditch by the bridge, watching the road. A bicycle appeared, its rider pedaling furiously, and Stephen stood up. The cyclist stopped and jumped from his bicycle, panting. Stephen knew he had come from the small house only minutes down the road, where two members of the local resistance waited. “Bluebird just phoned. Le Duc and Cleopatra have left the jail with a Gestapo officer in a black car.”
“Good.” Stephen had hoped fervently that the car would take them back tonight instead of waiting for the morning. A daytime rescue was far more dangerous, especially since the rescue plane would only fly at night, forcing them to hide out all day, waiting for it.
The messenger hopped back on his bicycle and rode across the bridge toward his home. Stephen crawled partway down the bank of the stream and checked the charges high under the two posts supporting the small bridge on this side. Moving quickly and efficiently, he attached the wires to the explosives and scrambled back up the bank. The estimate was that it would take a car thirty minutes to reach the bridge from the jail, which didn’t leave him a lot of time. He ran through the ditch, the wire spinning out behind him from the spool in his hands.
He reached the trees, where three men waited for him. He snipped the wires and attached them to the detonator. And they waited.
“I hear an engine.”
The man closest to Stephen raised his binoculars and sighted down the road. “A big black car. Mercedes. This is it.”
Stephen fixed his eyes on the hood of the car. Closer, closer. The explosion had to come at exactly the right moment. Not close enough to hurt the occupants of the car, but close enough to shake them up and make the driver jam on the brakes. He drew a last steadying breath and shoved down the plunger.
The near end of the bridge exploded, sending wood and stone flying. The car skidded, brakes squealing, and fishtailed to a stop. Stephen and his men were already out of the trees and running toward the car.
Inside the car Alyssa, Philippe, and the guard were flung to the floor. Alyssa heard Schlieker bite out a curse as he bounced off the dashboard. The driver pulled out his gun and began to fire out the window toward the men running at them. The guard had hit his head when he fell, and struggled groggily to rise. Philippe reached down, grabbing the guard and pulling him up. Schlieker ripped his gun from its holster and whirled to aim at Philippe, but Philippe twisted, jerking the guard in front of him, and Schlieker’s bullet struck the guard.
Alyssa grabbed Schlieker’s gun arm, and his second shot went wild. Philippe shoved aside the guard’s body and lunged at Schlieker, struggling to pry the gun from his hand. Silently, desperately, they struggled for possession of the weapon. “Run!” Philippe roared to Alyssa. “Run, damn it!”
Bullets thudded into the front doors, but they were obviously armored, for the shots had little effect. Alyssa threw open her door and tumbled out onto the road in a crouch, intending to open the front door and attack Schlieker from behind. But she was thrust aside by a hard arm, and a rifle barked beside her. Suddenly Schlieker’s head was bathed in red, shattered glass falling around him.
The German slumped forward, and Philippe jerked the gun from his limp hand. The driver continued to fire out his window at their attackers, who were now stretched out in the grass as they fired back. Philippe brought the gun down hard on the back of the driver’s neck, and he collapsed against the door.
The man beside Alyssa shouted at his men to cease firing. Philippe crawled out of the car, and Alyssa threw her manacled hands around his neck, clinging to him. He kissed her hair and eyes and mouth, murmuring, “My darling, my darling, are you all right?” He ran anxious hands down her.
“Yes, yes, I’m fine. What about you?”
“A scratch.” He glanced down at one arm, and Alyssa saw that blood stained his shirt. Clumsily she ripped away the sleeve. “It’s nothing,” Philippe assured her. “I was grazed by one of the bullets from outside, that’s all.”
But Alyssa had to clean away the blood with the remnant of his sleeve and see for herself before she believed him. The man who had shot Schlieker reached into the car and pulled out a set of keys from Schlieker’s pocket. Quickly he unfastened their manacles, and for the first time Alyssa looked straight at him. She gaped.
“I know you!”
“Uh-huh.” The man grinned.
Her mind was whirling, full of jumbled fragments, and it took her a moment to place him. “You’re Jessica’s friend.” Jessica had written her about Stephen when Alyssa was training in Hampshire, and she had met him briefly one day at Jessica’s house when she returned to London.
“That’s me.” He stuck out his hand to shake Philippe’s. “Stephen Marek. Pleased to meet you.”
“Philippe Michaude.” Philippe grinned. “We owe you a great deal of thanks.”
“No time for it now. We have to get this show on the road. There’s a plane waiting for us, if the pilot hasn’t lost his nerve. The longer it sits, the more danger it’s in. And if I lose a Lysander to the Germans, I might as well not go back with you.”
The other three men had come up to the car, quiet men in rough, dark clothing. They helped Philippe and Stephen pull the driver and Schlieker from the car and into the ditch. Then one of the men hopped in the front to drive, and Stephen got in with him, his gun across his lap. Alyssa and Philippe climbed in the back. The other two men melted into the dark trees. The driver wheeled the car around, and they zoomed back down the road in the direction from which they had come. In a few miles they turned off onto a side road and bumped along it at a slower pace.
Philippe wrapped his arms around Alyssa and held her close. It was difficult to absorb the sudden change in their circumstances, the fact that Schlieker was dead and they were racing for a plane that would take them to safety in England. He kissed the top of Alyssa’s head. She could feel the thudding beat of his heart beneath her. This was real. They were nearly out of danger.
“Is there time now for our thanks?” Philippe asked Stephen lightly.
Stephen swiveled around in the front seat to grin at them. “No need. I had to get you two home. Jessica agreed to marry me, and she needs a bridesmaid.”
“You and Jessica are getting married!” Alyssa gasped. “But how marvelous!”
Philippe chuckled. “Congratulations.” He squeezed Alyssa a little tighter. “Perhaps we should make it a double ceremony.”
The car slowed down and stopped. “We have to hoof it from here.” Stephen shook the driver’s hand, and they got out of the car. The driver stepp
ed on the gas and roared off down the road. “He’ll dump the car somewhere else so they won’t find their landing strip,” Stephen explained. “Come on, it’s this way.”
He disappeared into the trees beside the road, and Alyssa and Philippe followed. A few minutes’ walk brought them out of the trees into a long, flat meadow. The dark, squat shape of a Lysander loomed on the field. Alyssa’s heart leaped into her throat. They walked faster, then broke into a run.
The pilot, pacing nervously beside the plane, saw them and scrambled into the cockpit. He fired up the engines as soon as they climbed into the plane. On both sides, men ran along flicking on the rows of lanterns that served as their primitive runway lights. The three passengers settled in, Alyssa cuddled in Philippe’s arms, as the plane lumbered through the meadow, gaining speed at what seemed an alarmingly slow pace. Then, abruptly, amazingly, the plane lifted, and they were off the ground, climbing upward into the dark night sky to safety. To freedom. To love.
Epilogue
Paris, France, April 26, 1946
Alyssa breathed in the heavy scent of the pale pink rosebuds. Philippe had sent her a vaseful. She smiled, thinking of him. No doubt he was already seated in the audience, waiting for her to appear onstage. Her father would be sitting beside him. With the war over and Roosevelt dead, Grant’s duties had greatly diminished, and he finally retired. Now he spent several months out of the year in Paris.
On Philippe’s other side would be Jessica and Stephen. They were married soon after Stephen returned from his rescue mission, and Alyssa and Philippe followed suit only a few weeks later. Over the years the two couples remained close friends.
After their return to England, Stephen and Philippe worked together in the organization and were even involved in the same mission once or twice. Somehow they both managed to come through the war alive, though Stephen broke a leg in a parachute drop in Yugoslavia in 1943, and it had been poorly set, leaving him with a slight limp. Philippe was with him on that expedition, and it sealed their friendship, though Alyssa and Jessica were never able to find out exactly what happened there.
Alyssa glanced through the pile of telegrams on the table beside the flowers. There was one from each of her grandmothers, of course, and her mother. Ky and Claire sent their best wishes; they were unable to come because Ky had finally been allowed inside Poland to search for relatives who might have survived the war. There were wires from a number of Philippe’s business acquaintances and the friends they had made since they returned to France after the Liberation. Even Ian Hedley, still snowed under with secretive work—though at least his offices had been taken out of the damp basement of Evington Court—sent words of encouragement.
Alyssa pulled out one telegram to read again. It was from Lora and Kingsley Gerard, encouraging her to “break a leg” and promising another joint assault on the Parisian fashion houses before the year was out. Alyssa smiled. How terribly long ago that seemed. Six years.
Tonight would be her first stage performance since then. Her first ever in France. It seemed odd to be back in the theater after so long—not just in terms of years but in what she had done. Her work in Washington, in France, then at Evington Court with Jessica. She left Evington Court three years ago, pregnant with Philippe’s child, and became a full-time mother to little Charles. It was hard to leave Charles for several hours each day when she began rehearsing, but she knew he was in the care of not only his efficient French nursemaid but also Georges, who loved Charles as if he were his own grandson. It was strange to return to the stage after so long, but it was dear and familiar, too, like coming home. The theater, no matter where, was always a family place.
For Alyssa and Philippe it was all part of picking up the pieces again, adjusting to life after the years of devastating war. They had returned to France soon after the Allied troops freed Paris, and for the nearly two years since, there was a long, hard process of rebuilding—a business, a country, a life. Like finding all the pieces of a shattered glass and painstakingly gluing them back together, what they achieved was not quite the original but a newly conceived mosaic. It hadn’t been easy, but slowly everything was coming together for all of them.
Jessica, who had always been a homebody, had become a citizen of the world when Stephen returned to his career as a foreign correspondent. They were living in Berlin now, but there was no telling when he would be assigned elsewhere. Strangely enough, Jessica enjoy the life, despite having to pack up two children under three and a nanny in order to follow him. She was in a way still a homebody, but her home now was wherever Stephen was.
Alyssa checked her makeup in the mirror again. Her stomach was a knot of nerves. She had never performed Molière, and she had never performed in French either—unless you counted the part she had played here in Paris four years ago. The part of a lifetime.
The war days were over now—the fear, the wreckage of lives, the demands of duty. But there was still one thing that had lived then and lived now, the single lodestar, the bright and shining essence of her life: her love for Philippe, and his for her. That love was true and never-changing, and she knew that it would carry her always, even past this life.
There was a knock upon the door. It was time for her to go to the wings and await her entrance cue. She looked at the picture of Philippe on her dressing table, the snapshot of him holding their son tucked into the corner of the frame. She smiled and opened the door and walked forward.
Candace Camp is the NY Times best-selling author of over 70 novels, including the popular Mad Moreland series, The Rainbow Season, and A Momentary Marriage. Her books have been published in twenty-three countries and 17 languages. She wrote her first novel while in law school and happily gave up her work as an attorney to pursue her lifelong dream of writing books. Born in Amarillo, Texas, she now lives in Austin, Texas with her husband, Pete Hopcus. Her daughter is young adult author Anastasia Hopcus.
For a complete list of her books, go to candace-camp.com. You can also visit her at facebook.com/candacecampauthor/ or @campcandace on Twitter.
Other titles by Candace Camp
A Perfect Gentleman
A Momentary Marriage
The Rainbow Season
The Rainbow Promise
Mad Morelands series
Mesmerized
Beyond Compare
Winterset
An Unexpected Pleasure
His Sinful Touch
His Wicked Charm
Lost Heirs Series
A Stolen Heart
Promise Me Tomorrow
No Other Love
Matchmaker Series
The Marriage Wager
The Bridal Quest
The Wedding Challenge
The Courtship Dance
St. Dwynwen Series
A Winter Scandal
A Summer Seduction
The Marrying Season
Secrets of the Loch Series
Treasured
Pleasured
Enraptured